Jesus plus nothing

This Republican primary season is truly remarkable.  The rhetoric is surfacing all sorts of coded messages, some of which are blatant, and others are much more subtle.  It is the latter where one must be rather careful not to read into what is being said something which is not there.  The one that I actually thought rather clever, and not very destructive, was calling Mitt Romney “a lighter version of the President”.  This could be taken two ways.  Romney is actually closer to the center than his campaign is portraying him, or his skin color is “lighter”. 

Recently the radical religious right has started saying that President Obama wants to remake the United States into a form of European socialism.  There is a lot of underlying meaning in that phrase that may not be obvious to anyone but a political junkie like me.  First, however, I must explain that much of my thinking about the radical religious right has been shaped by two books by Jeff Sharlet:  The Family and its sequel: C Street.  Thus, I must refer any reader to about the first half of Sharlet’s book, The Family for an in depth historical description of what I can only sort of allude to in a short blog such as this one.  My own family experience from the 1930’s, however, corroborated what Sharlet had to say.

When our country was first founded, the Puritans had what was, to my mind, the rather peculiar notion that one could tell who God was smiling on because of the man’s material wealth.  Thus, the acquisition of wealth became the goal in order to be one of God’s obvious chosen.  If a man was not wealthy, it was due to some fault within the man (women were not included in this discussion) that prevented God from rewarding him.  Also part of the Puritan theology was that salvation came through faith in Jesus as found in Scripture, and not also through “good works”, as was promulgated by the Church of the anti-Christ in Europe, the Roman Catholic Church, and subsequently the Lutheran and Anglican Church.  Martin Luther coined the phrase: sola scriptura.  That is, one could only be saved by faith alone, which could only be found in the Christian scriptures.  The Puritans firmly believed that America was to be the New Jerusalem – the City on a Hill that was to be the Christian beacon for the rest of the world.  The old ways in Europe were corrupt and false, and were led by the Pope – the anti-Christ. 

In Sharlet’s book, the new Puritan attitude, was first taught by Abram Vereide, a Norwegian immigrant, and subsequently taken up by Doug Coe.  Coe is the current spiritual leader of The Family and of C Street.  In this theory, the owners of the companies are to be given absolute loyalty by the workers, even if the owners, or CEO’s, do not reciprocate.  This loyalty is to be given because the owners can be seen to be blessed by God because they are the owners.  Because employee unions expect the workers to be loyal to the unions, and because the unions work for the welfare of the workers which may be antithetical to the aims of the owners, unions are anathema and are to be fought to the nth degree.  Further, the fat treasuries of the unions are a danger to the owners because these funds can be donated to elect politicians who will restrict the unfettered freedom the owners really want.  So we have the proliferation of Right to Work laws, which prevent unions from organizing and collecting dues, which is blatant union busting.

Probably one of the most astounding chapters in The Family was the one titled, “Jesus plus nothing”.  Very simply put, all one needs is a personal relationship with Jesus.  It doesn’t hurt to read the New Testament, but not particularly required.  What basically just having “Jesus plus nothing” does is eliminate all of the great religious and spiritual thinking of the past 2000 years.  Ignore St. Augustine, St. Francis of Assisi, St. Thomas Aquinas, all of the great Catholic teachings on social justice, and after WWII, all of the great writings of theologians such as Karl Barth, Karl Rahner, Dietrich Bonhoffer, et al.  Not that one needs to read or understand all of these theologians but thoughtful people need to have a least an understanding that there are many ways to live Christianity, and to relate what Jesus actually taught to how we live our lives.  And how we live our lives is vitally important for the common good of all the earth.  According to a philosophy of “Jesus plus nothing”, one simply prays to Jesus and He will let you know what you should do.  I have often wondered how often Jesus absolutely supports what the person petitioning Him for!  Further, by ignoring the Hebrew Scripture entirely, this right wing radical Christian fundamentalism loses all of the great wisdom and spiritual writings without which Christianity is nothing lacks any considerable substance, and becomes form over substance.

So how does this relate to what is being said in this election cycle?  If a candidate truly believes that God will reward the ardent believer with material possessions, and that the person without the possessions has none through some grievous fault of his or her own, then of course social safety nets are in direct opposition to what God really wants.  And anyone who promotes social safety nets, and wishes to tax the wealthy to provide the funding to do so, is an anti-Christ European socialist, taking away the goods that God has rewarded people with to give to someone God has not smiled on. 

The sad thing is that although many people do not subscribe to the religious belief that God rewards with material goods, that mind-set is still very prevalent among many conservatives and liberals alike.  One hears it all the time:  blame the victim.  If someone doesn’t have a job because they worked for a company Bain Capital destroyed and lost their home because they couldn’t make the payments and is protesting with the 99%, then Newt Gringrich thinks they should just get a job, after they take a bath! 

I’m looking forward to the upcoming debates about what kind of a country we want, and what form of capitalism results from these debates and concerns expressed above.  The conclusions from this debate will also determine what kind of people we will transition into.